By Tanya Bansal is an enthusiastic individual, Marketing Executive at Ameyo

WhatsApp has become the most popular messaging application across the world. Around 2 billion users across 180 countries use WhatsApp as a communication channel monthly, opening up the possibility for businesses to engage with their customers on the channel preferred by the millennials. And businesses are prioritizing messaging to preserve the human touch in the contactless world.

After the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become imperative that businesses provide human to human interactions for the customers. It’s the age of digital engagement and customers seek support from their brands on their preferred channel. Lucky the world that WhatsApp has opened the door for business to consumer engagement on WhatsApp.

So, why WhatsApp for Customer Service?

Let’s do the math. 2 billion people use WhatsApp for their daily communication with their business and the open rate on WhatsApp messaging application is 70% which compared to any other channel is likely very high.

And since WhatsApp has brought in the option to connect with your customers instantly, it also brings the features that will simplify the customer’s journey with your brand.

Instant Two Way Communication: Now, customers are looking for instant replies for their queries and you can ensure that the customer is satisfied with the answers. For instance, a customer is waiting for their flight booking confirmation, you can send them a WhatsApp notification, with their consent, to confirm their flight status instantly.

An agent can handle 5 chats simultaneously while he can attend only one call at a time. With WhatsApp, you can engage with more customers at the same time.

Easy Rich Media Support: Sending attachments like an invoice PDF, account statement, flight ticket PDF, videos, and live location has become very easy with WhatsApp. Now, your customers will not have to check their emails constantly to get an update on their order. They can opt-in to receive notifications from their brands on the channel that they prefer.

All Customer Data in One Place: With omnichannel ticketing, automatic support tickets are created when the customer posts an inquiry on WhatsApp. Your agents won’t have to manage multiple tabs to respond to customer queries, they can now easily access all customer-related tickets in their unified dashboard and reply to the customers from within the intuitive agent interface.

This saves both time and effort of the agents and helps achieve a higher first contact resolution rate. Empowering agents with the WhatsApp Customer Service Platform as an engagement channel improves the customer satisfaction rate.

Solve First-Level Queries using Bot: Automated bots have helped businesses solve almost 80% of their first-level queries even without involving any agent. You can scale your customer service with the intent-based conversational AI, ensuring that customers get an instant reply to their queries while agents are busy handling critical queries.

And ensure smooth bot to agent deflection when the query gets escalated without compromising on the customer experience.

Analyze Customer Engagement on WhatsApp: Let’s face it, you need the data to analyze the channel effectiveness and why not! You can analyze the chat trends and query flow with a detailed channel report to check the effectiveness of each message template. You can make informed decisions to avoid SLA breaches and maximize agents’ productivity.

This will help you to analyze the query pattern and the resources can be allocated to the queues as per the query flow.

Improve Agent Experience: Provide your agents the flexibility to access customer information like their previous interaction history, their in-product preferences, and the CSAT score to deliver an experience that the customers will love. Integrate your CRM with your ticketing system to enable agents to get the synced data.

Agents can further transfer the tickets to another agent, department, or their supervisors with full context so that no interaction is missed and the customers do not get a broken experience.

In A Nutshell

Engaging on WhatsApp has reduced customer service cost significantly compared to email or voice calls. Being present on the platform that your customers choose further strengthens their confidence and trust in the brand. You can increase your business’ productivity by manifolds with the WhatsApp Customer Engagement Platform.

WhatsApp is not only cost-effective but also saves time for the agents as it allows them to handle multiple chats simultaneously and most of the queries are solved through the bot, thus sparing more time for agents to handle the queries that require more attention. WhatsApp has forever changed the landscape of customer service, becoming the choicest messaging application for the world.